Screenshot showing a little sample app opened at "localhost:5174" with an "edit profile" form and a little overlap called "scenetest" that has little checkmarks for different tests that passed and little timestamps

apparently you can just write your own testing framework and no one will stop you...

(github.com/mhsnook/scen...)

a picture of a baseball cap with 3 lines of English and 2 lines of Chinese/Kanji. The english reads: "Hello, I am fleeing the American century of humiliation. Can you show me where to watch gay hockey TV shows?"

WE LOVE WEARABLE FLASHCARDS

screenshot showing "Display preferences" with an option for dyslexia-friendly fonts (they use visual cues to help the brain orient letters so they don't accidentally get flipped or switched, which causes some of the reading challenges that make up what we call "Dyslexia")

I have been wanting to do this for ages. ❤️ accessibility -- please feel free to reach out if you ever spot anything that would make the app more accessible for you.

the meme "do you guys wanna see a dead body" but the second half has been replaced with "learn a language" four young boys in a group, one holding a football, one wearing an Oakland Raiders cap, looking down and to the left, one covering his face in disgust, one looking sort of "skeptical/unsure" and the other two just blankly staring.

Getting my friends to do beta testing -- #BuildInPublic

Too late, it's already merged! sunlo.app/learn/browse -- it's very basic, but its a start! You can browse the languages, see posts, comments, playlists. (Yay) We're excited to improve the browsing/surfing experience and cultivate the excited-clicking-vibes, but it will have to wait a bit ⏳

Is it unprofesshh to share short-lived feature preview branches while #BuildInPublic 'ing?

sunlo-tanstack-git-feat-public-mode-michaelsnooks-projects.vercel.app/learn/browse

Working on "public mode" to make our learning materials and the comment threads about them into public resources -- very fun

A screenshot of the app showing title bar "Playlist of Kannada Flashcards" and a main content section showing the author is our sample user "GarlicFace", and a title "KG Podcast on 'Counting' from June 2021". Description says: "A podcast episode from 'Kannada Gothilla' on counting, detailing the basic digits, the counting system for 10s and 100s, and giving examples of common phrases where you'd use numbers in daily life." A heart icon showing 0 likes. An external link icon "Source link" (links to the podcast episode). Then a separator and "12 flashcards in this playlist" and a button "Add all to deck". And then shows a list of flashcards, with number 1 saying "Vandu tea kudhi" "give one tea". Number 2 days "Nanu eradu dose tinde" "I had two dosas", and the rest is out of view off the screen.

It's getting FUN over here. We are on a mission to augment the processes by which people _actually learn_ languages in real life. People like to learn by listening to podcasts, watching movies, and learning songs. Now you can make a playlist out of all the phrases you learn and share with others.

And, importantly, the platform is entirely democratic. Unlike the more curated language apps, the Sunlo library is not limited to only learning from/via the languages that have powerful currencies and ready-to-pay users; anyone who wants to learn or teach can contribute on any topic.

A comments thread showing someone requesting a flashcard for how to hail a cab in Igbo. One person replies with a flashcard that means "please take me home" and another person replies to that comment saying "the question was more about hailing the cab, so instead I would say this" and links to another flashcard that has a more apt meaning. Each comment has space for upvotes and replies, flashcards have littke "heart" icons so you can follow them, etc.

Now I think even one screenshot gives the idea. The "requests" feed functions like any other forum, and helps you express what you want to learn and lets others say "me too! I want to learn this!" which gives motivation for all the fluent speakers who are excited to help others learn their culture.

Sunlo originally started as an idea to do ~"flash cards like Anki, but crowdsource them like Wiki entries".

But the idea really gelled together when we tied it together with this social layer: "like ask-reddit or stack-overflow, but the answers are flashcards you can add to your review deck."

thank you!

I'm not sure we're ready for an influx of users yet, just people who are really keen to see what's up can log in and try it out. (we don't yet have moderation/safety tools, help/error/feedback support, etc.)

but I'll bookmark this for when we start to look outwards a bit more. thanks.

It's looking realer and realer every day... #BuildInPublic

We're working on some really exciting UX / user journey stuff, but have yet to finish merging the big data-layer upgrades 🙈🙈🙈😇😇😇

We're a little ways off from launching this multi-lingual approach, but it reflects some of the values and ideas behind Sunlo – you don't learn so you can translate; you learn to connect with people and groups, for a time and place and a range of contexts that's personal to you.

A screenshot/mockup of an interface "My learning goals" showing the top half of a screen. description: "Manage and customise you language learning objectives. Add promps, select languages, and tag your motivation." then there are three items, the top two are green-background and the third is grayed out. the first one has title "Moving to South India", and italicized content "Learn how to get around, otder food, book travel, ask about products and prices, ask for help, etc." then it says "in languages" and has four little badges, "Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam". In the upper right of the box (and the other green box) are icons to move the item up or down in the list, a Pin to "pin" this item, a pencil icon to edit, and a power switch to enable/disable. The second green item has a number "2" on the side and says title "Family Languages" and contents: "Become pretty fluent to converse with family, friends, understand cultural references and idioms" and then finally "In (2) languages" with badges for "Marathi, Konkani". The third item is grayed out a bit; there aren't as many button in the top-right. The content says title "Just for fun" and text "Learn to count to 10 and say please/thankyou type basics in the world's most commonly spoken languages." And then below it says "in (13) languages" with badges for: "Arabic, French, Mandarin, Russian, Japanese, Portuguesse, Spanish, Zulu, Hindi, Bengali, Farsi, Swahili, Tamil". This one has a little white alert that has the power symbol and says "Disabled: New cards will not be added from this goal". Then it's a little truncated so you can't see if there's more on the page except the title and this list of three items.

This second image shows the same "My Learning Goals" title and description as the first (please see the first/previous image description for missing context here). It only has two items, and shows at the bottom a button that says "Add another goal" with a plus sign. This screenshot has the same "Family languages" goal as the previous, same text and buttons and light green colour. But it's second in the list. This time the first item is light yellow/gold, rather than green, and its "Pin" icon is filled in yellow to indicate this item is pinned. It has an alert at the bottom of the card that has a star and says, "Primary focus: New flash cards will mostly come from this goal". The title of this item is "Moving for Work" and the text description is "Learn basic conversational spanish for my 3-month work trip to Mexico City, with a particular focus on my workplace, a web development agency, where we will speak a fair amount of English and interact with English-language tools and documentation, but we will mostly converse and have meetings in Spanish". Then finally, "In (1) language" with a badge that just says "Spanish".

We are cooking up some interesting things over here...

Do you know any other apps that allow you to learn certain language topics across a region or multiple languages? we're not aware of any but would love to see if there are!

BBC News Pidgin headline, photo of ants crawling on a cube of sugar: "Ant wey wan flex sugar, suppose ready for slippers"

BBC News Pidgin headline, photo of a woman looking in a mirror applying theatrical makeup: "Mirror new dey lie, na you no wan see di truth"

BBC News Pidgin headline, photo showing a woman luxuriating on a couch, fanning herself with money: "If you no use sense cop wetin dey sweet, e go purge your belle"

BBC News Pidgin headline, photo of a cute little rat being lowered down on a mission-impossible-style harness, trying to safely lift the cheese off of a mouse trap: "If bush meat no sabi trap, trap sabi bush meat"

We can't wait till Sunlo has a library of Pidgin flash cards... one of Sunlo's core ideas is that around the world, most people are speaking some kind of pidgin or creole language, and we would love to support learners exploring this beautiful, practical, expressive, West African language.

A tweet from Vercel CEO proudly posting his selfie with Benjamin Ntanyahu, "Optimistic for peace, safety, and greatness for Israel and its neighbours."

Welp. I guess we're leaving Vercel...

deck settings section called "your daily goal", there are three options, "10 - relaxed", "15 - standard", and "20 - serious". the icons are relaxed: a kitty cat; standard: 3 scoops of ice cream; serious: a rocket ship.

d'y'all like my icons? we are doing a UX pass looking at navigation, discoverability of features, hinting at happy paths, etc. And icons are always a favourite topic to nerd out about with your designer pals :))

update! limited chat feature is live :)) we're making sure the flashcards stay the main character, so for now you can just send each other cards and accept/ignore them. let's see how it goes!

screenshot showing a blank chat window with a friend called "GarlicFace". At the bottom there's a chat box and a "send" button, and it says "send a phrase recommendation"

screenshot showing the previous page but now you've clicked the "send a phrase recommendation" button and there's a drawer pulled up that says "recommend a phrase" and has a search interface

screenshot showing a chat window with a friend sending you a couple of phrases. one of your messages back says "You added 'Estoy bien, gracias' to your deck" showing that when a friend sends you a phrase, they get little feedbacks when you decide to accept their recommendation.

Not me finally implementing the chat feature I've been putting off for ages....

user "biggest-gaudiest-patronuses" posts: "what if someone else does it better later?" Good! Technically the Wright brothers built the worst airplanes in the world. If you do it first, you do it worst, and history will thank you for it.

We are doing testing with our first users, and taking inspo from old Tumblr posts 😇🤗🧄🥦

business person: describe your audience me: sensitive, intelligent, empathic business person: no like ad demographics me: genius, beautiful, heroic business person: what products do they like me: love 💕

Wait, this is Sunlo's business plan... is that ... is that not how you do it?

Screenshot of the opened sidebar in the sunlo app -- at the top there's a dropdown menu that says "Choose a deck" and below there's a nav menu with sections called "Learning center" and "Friends & contacts". One of the links says "Start a new language" (instead of "start a new deck" which is the microcopy question being asked about here!)

Question for the #microcopy nerds out there:
"Choose a deck" vs. "Choose a language" ?
"Start a new language" vs. "Start a new deck" ?

Is one more concrete than the other? Is one more natural than the other? Is one easier to understand?

Microcopy is a subtle art and we're still learning!

psst -- if you only have 1 person on your team and no office and on tuesdays you go to a local board game studio for their coworking day, it's okay to say stuff like "Tuesday is our no-meetings day here at the Sunlo offices/campus/HQ"

(Sunlo will use language processing tools like tokenising and vectorising to categorise HUMAN-MADE flashcards and create "smart playlist" style sets of cards to add to your deck, but every flashcard, phrase, and translation will be written by people, for people.)

Headline from The Verge: Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI

👀👀👀
(Sunlo will never use AI-generated slop to try to teach you a language)
👀👀👀

Obviously with a pure DIY flashcards app you can do any language to any set of translations, but Sunlo will be the first app I've seen that is truly any-to-any (and any-to-many) and still offers a kind of structure for learners to get started using curated public resources. I hope it works!

Actually this is something I think is pretty neat about our flash card model: if you're learning Hindi and you speak French and English, Hindi phrases that have translations into both languages will show both translations, which can help with comprehension when the structures and grammars differ.

The app uses user-generated content to populate the flash card library so it can support any language to/from any other language as long as we have users. But from the start we'll be focusing on seed content for English speakers to learn Hindi, Tamil, Spanish and French.